Sneak Preview

I’m in a loquacious mood tonight. So I thought I’d show off a small sneak-preview of a project that I’ve been working on for... well, a long time. It’s not exactly anything groundbreaking. And most people probably won’t care, because it’ll be quite expensive. But what is it?

It’s The Starfleet Museum: The Definitive Print Edition.

I’ve been corresponding with Masao, the author and artist behind the Starfleet Museum for going on eight years now. It started out with a simple inquiry about casualty figures for the Earth-Romulan War. And though I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever completely publishing my own treatise on that conflict, we’ve exchanged a few thousand emails over the years, discussing various ideas. Masao has bounced various ideas off with me, from serious stuff like Romulan reunification to crazy ideas like Klingons converting to Christianity.

I first started working on this book project as a way to start learning Pages, a word processor and desktop publishing app. I wanted something that I could sink my teeth into, to develop a template and customize the design. But I didn’t count on the project taking on a life of its own. It started as a four-page proof-of-concept document.

And now, it’s at 254 pages and counting.

There’s lots of work left to be done: plenty of copyediting, proofreading, and continuity-checking; and the graphics need to be updated in a few places. And suffice to say that this book, when finished, probably won’t come cheap. (We plan to use Lulu.com to publish it, and it’ll probably run around US$45 or so.)